The art is replete with various sheet materials that can be cut into smaller pieces to form portions of fasteners, and methods for making such sheet materials. U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,009,235; 4,024,003; 4,290,832; 4,454,183 provide illustrative examples. Generally these patents have described sheet materials including backings from which project yarns that form either loops, loops cut along one side to form hooks, or projections that have enlarged heads at their distal ends, and which backings anchor portions of the yarns so that the loops, hooks or headed projections on pieces of such material may be engaged with other such structures on pieces of other such sheet materials to form fasteners.
Such yarns have been either embedded into a polymeric backing layer while it was heat softened so that the yarns were fused to the backing; or woven into a cloth backing that was of regularly woven construction, which backing was then coated with an adhesive-like material applied by spraying, soaking or extruding so that the yarns were more solidly anchored in place. The former method provides extremely strong anchoring of the yarns by fusing them to the backing layer, however, it requires complex and expensive special equipment to make wide widths of the material. The latter method can be used to make materials in wide widths, however, it is slow and requires an extra step to apply the adhesive-like material to the backing so that the cost of the resultant sheet material is relatively high.